Sangram Takmoge

“With complex issues, it can be ridiculously hard to pin a particular cause on a given effect. Did the assault-weapon ban really cut crime—or was it one of ten other factors? Did the economy stall because tax rates were too high—or were the real villains all those Chinese exports and a spike in oil prices?”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“NLP has its roots in the field of behavioural science, developed by Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner and Edward Thorndike. It uses physiology (physical and biological states) and the unconscious mind to change thought processes and therefore behaviour.”
― Neil Shah, A Practical Guide to NLP: Turn Negatives into Positives

“It isn’t only that we know less than we pretend about the outside world; we don’t even know ourselves all that well. Most people are terrible at the seemingly simple task of assessing their own talents. As two psychologists recently put it in an academic journal: “Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.” A classic example: when asked to rate their driving skills, roughly 80 percent of respondents rated themselves better than the average driver.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“This phenomenon was beautifully captured in a 1998 article for Red Herring magazine called “Why Most Economists’ Predictions Are Wrong.” It was written by Paul Krugman, himself an economist, who went on to win the Nobel Prize.* Krugman points out that too many economists’ predictions fail because they overestimate the impact of future technologies, and then he makes a few predictions of his own. Here’s one: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak